A Voyeur in Plato’s Cave

 

Why was this place named Plato’s Retreat?” I asked the manager. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just a name, I guess.”

One sultry August evening in New York, I sat on the balcony of a friend’s apartment on the 31st floor of the old Sheraton Hotel and  watched night take command of the city. As the sun disappeared, the pragmatists shut off their office lights and the players began to colonize the darkness. Neon theater marquees invited tired realists to slip into fantasy_; restaurants and shop windows beckoned.. From my Olympian perch, individuals were scurrying paramecia, nearly invisible, but the law governing the city was obvious in the orderly movement of light. Long strings of green lights flashed, and traffic moved up and down town. The string turned red, and the headlights moved crosstown, like tracer bullets, down luminous streets.

It had been a nearly perfect day. I had come to New York to talk to my agent about a book long in the making on sexual realities and illusions (at one time or another calledThe Love Book, The Amorous Pilgrimage, andThe Many Faces of Eros). He had paid for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and encouraged me to complete the manuscript, so I was full and hopeful. I had accomplished enough during the day to satisfy my Protestant conscience and felt I had earned the right to a moderate amount of excess.

What nightcap should I have to end such a day, asked myself. A quiet evening reading? Warm milk? No thanks. A Clint Eastwood thriller at a nearby theater? Straight whiskey? Too ordinary. A string quartet at Carnegie Hall? Benedictine and Brandy? Too sweet for my mood. What I wanted was more like straight ouzo. “A little excess is good for the system,” Somerset Maugham. said. Even Socrates was warned by his demon that a philosopher’s mind must be tutored in the lyric art of music. Yes, an evening with Dionysus would refresh my spirit. But where, I wondered, were bacchanalian rites being performed in Manhattan. It was then that I remembered Plato’s Retreat.

A year earlier, my friend Jim Peterson had called me in San Francisco in a state of high excitement when he was doing a story for Playboy on “The Public Sex Breakthrough.” “You have to go and see it for yourself,” he said. “It’s sexual fantasyland. Everything you have imagined in private is done before your eyes. It is the next step after Woodstock and Esalen, the counterculture of the 80s.” Now that I was in New York, I could not pass up the opportunity to advance my erotic knowledge by a visit to America’s first openly advertised, popularly priced spa for public sex. No nonsense about therapy, no California Sandstone hype about increasing your human potential or exploring spirituality through tantric sexuality. I had seen all that. This was simply a place where couples could make love (or whatever) in the presence of others—switch, mix, swap, swing, or merely watch. It was the Playboy mansion for the masses, champagne sex at beer prices.

All very well, but Presbyterians don’t go to orgies. Although I was a decorated veteran of the sexual rlution (Silver Star for Nude Encounters, Purple Heart for Shattered Illusions), the notion of public sex still made my taboos tremble. A chorus of oughts and ought-nots, don’ts and fears, spoke in disorderly haste. A gathering of elders waited on me with shocked. faces—parents, gentle friends, distinguished professors—all the guardians of my former days who had pruned my young and budding mind into a wholesome arbor, useful, fruitful, shade-giving. The Reverend McCloud of the Covenant Church led the forces of the superego—a pious Scot steeped in the Westminster Confession, ascetically thin and burning with a pas- sion for true religion, a good man who could bring the prophetic challenge to a smug suburb of DuPont ex- ecutives or the aroma of the peace that passes understanding to the bedside of the dying. He shook his head silently from side to side at the thought of what I, once a candidate before Presbytery, was proposing to do.

The dialogue was rudely interrupted by the appearance of a hairy-legged satyr who rode into the parlor from his cave deep in the unexplored region of my psyche. He looked straight at me. I felt shame and sorrow for all the years I had kept him in exile. He winked, and I picked up the telephone. Plato’s Retreat: 627-1959. “The manager, please?”

With arrangements made, I combed my hair, slipped a steno pad into my pocket,. and descended from the stratosphere of my imagination and into the streets.The taxi pulled up to the entrance, on West 74th Street, a quiet residential block. Plato’s might have been a Greek restaurant. No advertising. No pictures of couples joined in carnal embrace with broad black XXX’s painted by the censors over the regions likely to give public offense. The manager, a 50-ish woman with a brusque manner and an immobile face that spoke either of boredom or unflappable sophistication, examined my press card and recited the rules.

“You are here as a reporter, not a participant. You are free to look at anything, but you can’t touch. And you have to keep your clothes on. Even if some lady comes on to you, you can’t get involved. Tell her you are writing an article, or you are queer, or you have the clap. I don’t care what you tell her, but you can’t talk to her alone. If we see you cozying up to anyone, we will ask you to leave immediately. If you are going to interview any of the couples about their experience, you have to be sensitive. Don’t just bust in on people. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then let’s go, and I will give you a tour of the place. Do you have any questions?”

“Just one. Why was this place named Plato’s Retreat?”

“I don’t know. just a name, I guess.”

 

SHADOWS, IMAGES, REFLECTIONS

PLATO’S REPUBLIC:

Here is a parable to illustrate the degrees in which our nature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see only what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire is a track with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.

Now, behind this parapet, imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects, including figures of men and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project over the parapet.

In the first place, prisoners so confined would have seen nothing of themselves or of one another, except the shadows thrown by the firelight on the wall of the cave facing them. . .. Then such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.

We walked down a long set of stairs and emerged into an apartment basement that had once housed the Continental Baths, a gay gathering place redolent with memories of early Bette Midler. The atmosphere was humid and dark. The dark carpet and black walls absorbed all but the garish strobe light that ricocheted from the turning mirrored ball over the dance floor. A manufactured cloud of mist periodically engulfed the dancers, who twisted to thundering disco music. The center of the main room was dominated by a heated swimming pool. (Pisces governs the liquid realm. The rule here is flow and go with it.) Around it were positioned chaise lounges on which couples could play before and after taking the plunge. At the rear of the room was a tiled Jacuzzi and a small pillowed alcove to which those who had been stimulated more than soothed by thewaters might retire. Rows of couches surrounded one side of the dance floor. At the other end of the room were cafe tables, a bar that served soft drinks (the New York State Liquor Authority ruled that liquor cound not be served, perhaps fearing that primal inhibitions might be soluable in alcohol), and a buffet laden with cold cuts and potato salad for those whose oral needs had not been otherwise satiated. In back of the bar was a game room with pinball and pool and electronic toys. Next to that, a locker room and a long hall that led to a maze of small cubicles with mattresses, where the shy could retreat from public eyes for private consummation. (The tour, I noticed, had been arranged in order of escalating erotic intensity.) Finally, we arrived at the holy of holies: foreplay might take place in any of the erogenous zones from pool to bar, but most of the serious sex took place in the mattress room.

The mat room, a name suggesting more the gymnastic than the ecstatic, was a wall-to-wall combination of super-sized mattress and tumbling mats. Mirrors on the ceiling and along two walls allowed the actors to applaud their performances and get instant feedback, to see themselves as others saw them. The walls of the room were painted in a soft pink tinged with purple, as close as commercial enamel can come to the hue of an engorged vagina. A guard was stationed by the door to enforce the rules that were posted in bold type. No clothes allowed. Only male and female pairs were to enter (Noah’s Ark). Once inside, couples might split and recombine in any of the sexual logarithms —pyramids, squares, octagons—permitted by the number of their orifices and the flexibility of their bodies. The rule was often stretched to allow two women to enter with one man, but never vice versa. The male ego, it seems, is easily triggered to competition and is a poor sport when bested in flowery combat. The more capacious female shares and is shared with less anxiety and concern for performance. Homosexual couples were not forbidden by the letter, but excluded by the spirit, of the place. Nothing queer at Plato’s. (Alas, Socrates!)

My tour was complete, and the manager cast me adrift in the sea of flesh with one final warning: “Remember, look but don’t touch.” Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Once my eyes relaxed from the tour of duty and adjusted to the dim light, my sense of smell went on active duty. The heated pools lubricated the air and magnified every scent. The musky atmosphere was heavy with chlorine, perspiration, and a mixed batch of sexual unguents. Blond, brunette, and redheaded pheromones traced chemical paths into my limbic brain and released a flood of stored sexual memories, hopes, fears.

To quiet my rising anxiety (or was it desire? ), I retreated to the bar, quaffed some lime Kool-Aid, and tried the potato salad. Thus fortified, I sat and let my eyes feast on the sexual smorgasbord spread before me. Pairs and stray singles reclined on the chaises surrounding the pool. Two-thirds were either nude or sporting towels draped in progressive stages of revelation. The remaining third were fully clothed and trying to be inconspicuous, but managing only to look like first graders who had forgotten to bring something for show and tell. In the pool, a couple, perhaps inspired by John Lilly’s experiments with dolphins, tried to connect underwater. The ripples prevented close observation of their success. A steady stream of men and women trolled the edges of the pool in search of game fish.

Enough preliminaries. It was time for me to get down to serious voyeurism. I walked to the door of the mattress room and took in the taboo sights in a single gulp. Thirty, maybe 40, couples were splayed in a moving triptych of breasts, thighs, backs, arms, heads, and genitals. The parts did not seem to add up to any whole picture. My eyes did a quick survey, and I recognized most of the classical positions listed in The Varieties of Sexual Experience. Each time I focused on a single couple, embarrassment obscured my vision, until I finally had to turn my eyes aside. I tried alternating conversation with the guard with stolen glances.

“What’s it like to work here, to stand night after night and watch this scene?”

“I’ll tell you he said “It’s weird. At first it stimulated me, but recently it has me turned off to sex. I really love my wife, but we haven’t been getting it on so much since I started working here.”

“Has she been down here with you?”

“Once or twice, but she doesn’t like it very much. You know, you stand here long enough, and you see everything. You lose some of your uptightness about sex, but some of the mystery gets destroyed. Pretty soon it’s like watching wrestling on TV. Boring.”

As he was talking, I watched a couple who lay in front of the door. Her tender and vigorous ministrations were having no effect on his flesh. An adjacent hand protruded into their scene and started stroking her thigh. The hand was followed by a head that reached up and kissed.

Everything began to swim in front of my eyes. The scene melted into a memory of the aquarium in San Francisco. The bodies became eels, long tubes of flesh moving in a liquid environment, snakes writhing. in gelatinous seas. Just before I dissolved in the waves, I walked back from the edge and took refuge on a couch in a dark corner, where I could watch the goings on in the cave from a greater and safer distance.

From where I was sitting, I could see a narrow swath of the action in the mattress room reflected in the wall and ceiling mirrors. It was as if I were peeping through a rectangular keyhole. (I’m 17 again, in a bathouse at a hot mineral spring near Taos. I’m working in a carnival, Alfier Amusement Co. My first hot bath in a week. A knothole in the wall. A beautiful young woman anointing her body with oil. Her hands linger on the inside of her thighs. She begins to stroke herself and . . .”Why did you take so long in the dressing room?” my buddy Dick Haynes asked.)

I watched a fat woman mounted astride a hairy tree- trunk of a man. Her back arched as she moved. At the top of the frame, a shoulder and breast belonging to someone else. At the bottom, black and white legs entwined. The cinematic imagery made me feel more comfortable. Now it was like something I knew—a Fellini orgy in La Dolce Vita. I had stepped behind the green door and the actors in front of me were old familiar friends, like Marilyn Chambers and Harry Reems. They weren’t really real. My brain had been educated enough by films and TV to be relaxed with anything that was “just a movie.” The spectator watches a village being napalmed, a rebel executed, a hurricane, an orgy—any of the “ultimate acts”–from the safety- of noninvolvement. Even my Calvinistic superego could not make moral judgments about the make-believe world.

Meantime, my real focus was inward. Just behind my retinas, a whole film festival was in progress: “Taboos and Archetypes of Sin,” snippets from the private and public archives of Sam Keen:

Sodom and Gomorrah. The God of Israel illustrates the consequences of moral depravity by visiting fire and brimstone on men and women lost in senselust.

The Condemnation of Aphrodite (alias Ishtar, Astarte, Playmate of the Month). Again featuring Yahweh destroying those who worship the generative power of sex, participate in sacramental intercourse, and neglect the suffering of widows and orphans.

The Fall of Rome. The orgy that epitomizes decadence. A morality play in which the nongod of secular history first makes sensate those it wishes to destroy.

The Destruction of Mary Grace. An innocent Southern girl falls in love and is led into sin by an unscrupulous man interested only in sex. She gets pregnant, is abandoned, has an abortion, and dies. A tale told by my father.

Tasting Forbidden Pleasures. A philosopher stumbles across a young couple in a sea-cave in Del Mar, California, lost in lovemaking. He watches for a moment and turns aside. The same philosopher, under the influence of the Esalen ethic of experimentation, plays at three in bed. The results, first comical, twist into a dark scenario, ending in divorce.

Movement in the mirror caught my eye. I looked up in time to see the fat woman, apparently satisfied, slide down the hairy tree-trunk and rest thankful on the ground. I began to laugh. I, the metavoyeur, was watching myself watching in a mirror a couple watching themselves in a mirror. The spell lifted. I stepped out of the hall of mirrors (consciousness studying itself hoping to find the secret of consciousness) and returned to my observation post among the phenomena.

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PHENOMENA

PLATO’S REPUBLIC:

Now consider what would happen if their release from the chain and the healing of their unwisdom should come about in this way. Suppose one of them set free, and forced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes lifted to the light; all these movements would be painful, and he would be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see. What do you think he would say, if someone told him that what he had formerly seen was meaningless illusion, but now, being somewhat nearer to reality and turned toward more real objects, he was getting a truer view? And if he were forced to look at the firelight itself, would not his eyes ache, so that he would try to escape and turn back to the things is he could see distinctly, convinced that they really were clearer than these other objects now being shown him? Yes.

With disciplined intent, I suspended subjective judgments, bracketed out personal feelings, and set out to make a pure  phenomenological inquiry. just the facts as they might be seen by a neutral eye.

The phenomena were very active, indeed. The atmosphere of the mat room was one of perpetual motion. Everyone was busy making and doing.

The majority of couples who entered the room remained with each other and did not switch or swap. Some watched, fondled each other, and left without attempting intercourse. The most active performers, as in any classroom, clustered in the middle of the mat. Casual contacts between neighbors were made without formal introduction or ritual. Onlookers and pairs wishing to remain relatively private gravitated toward the walls. Four couples in the middle of the mat, engaged in lengthy exercises in the missionary position, worked steadily without seeming to build or discharge any noticeable excitement. Their mechanical repetitions seemed to produce a maximum amount of stimulation and a minimum amount of abandon.

The evidence of ecstatic self-loss was slight. Little moaning. Few loud cries. No yelling out of control. Little involuntary trembling. No boisterous bellows of satisfaction. Only two couples I watched in the course of my close observations made love with a mounting sense of excitement and spontaneous climax. One young black couple, lithe and elegant in all their motions, came in, seemed to have eyes for no one else, proceeded slowly to arouse each other, climbed to progressively higher plateaus of pleasure, rested, escalated the intensity until they plunged into the chasm and were still. They remained a few minutes and left.

Daisy chains blossomed and faded. Groups of three, four, five, or six came together for 15 or 20 minutes and disintegrated, like unstable molecules, into twosomes. (Once in the Big Bend wilderness in Texas I spent a whole afternoon watching the constellations of bubbles that emerged under a waterfall. With statistical regularity, the twosomes made it farthest down the rapids before being reabsorbed into the stream.)

Men did not touch each other. Only once did I see an exception to this unspoken dogma. Two couples entered together. Their ease suggested they were friends. Each made love and switched partners. As one man entered the woman previously enjoyed by the other, his friend put his hand on his back in a fond gesture.

Most attention was paid to the obvious erogenous zones. There was little involvement with (should I say “homage given,” “love showered upon”?) the great plains of the belly, the towers of the legs, the column of the neck. No exploration of the webbing between toes or fingers. No tracing the switchbacks in the ear or the broken pathways destiny has etched on the palm. Most of the subjects exhibited an almost obsessive haste to establish the genital connection. Little prolonged kissing or embracing. No minuets between eyes. The slow dance of courtship and the adornments of modesty were not part of this erotic world. The atmosphere was reminiscent, not of a gourmet restaurant where each morsel is savored, but rather of a McDonald’s—fast food and a standardized menu.

Distribution of body types, colors, ages was representative of a random sample of “normal,” mid-age (19 to 59) Americans. Endo-, ecto-, and mesomorphs of all races, colors, and creeds who could afford the $40 fee mingled democratically. There were no deformed bodies in sight. Also missing were the very fat. And the very beautiful. (Playboy, with its usual-devotion to archetypes of “beautiful people,” stocked the pool with cool men and double-breasted bunnies when they photographed their story. In reality, one sees more flab, paunch, and uneducated muscle at Plato’s than at the Esalen baths.)

 

 

THE LUST FOR UNDERSTANDING

PLATO’S REPUBLIC:

And suppose someone were to drag him away forcibly up the steep and rugged ascent and not let him go until he had hauled him into the sunlight, would he not suffer pain and vexation at such

treatment? And, when he had come out into the light, find his eyes so full of radiance that he could not see a single one of the things that he was now told were real?

Certainly he would not see them all at once.

He would need, then, to grow accustomed before he could see things in that upper world. At first it would be easiest to make out shadows, and then the images of men and things reflected in water, and later on the things themselves. After that, it would be easier to watch the heavenly bodies and the sky itself at night, looking at the light of the moon and stars rather than the Sun and the Sun’s light in the daytime.

Yes, surely.

Facts alone are sterile, not very sexy. To be interesting they must be teased and joined together in a suggestive hypothesis. Bare observation at Plato’s produced little to stimulate the mind.

As I watched the interactions of my subjects, my mind began to wander. Or rather, it went synapsing into metaphor. My “subjects” became: a mixed litter of puppies playing on a mat_; genital engineers studying the miles of sexual energy_; bargain seekers at an erotic fire sale_; ghosts injected with novocaine trying with cool desperation to recover a feeling of the human connection_; would-be athletes in training_; disembodied genitals in search of romance.

When metaphor begins its restless prodding of fact, it’s a sure sign the mind is preparing itself for an erotic pilgrimage from the multiplicity of observation to the unity of understanding. The eyes are blind until we ask how is a raven like a writing desk, a falling apple like the moon, an orgy like a . . . ? Until I could complete the sentence, I would not understand what I was seeing. The dumb data lay unmoving on the mat, waiting to be inseminated. Mind, the ultimate erogenous zone, is created by intercoursebetween virgin facts and gypsy questions.

Was there beneath the casual sex a deeper human quest? Was this place of fornication (from fornex, meaning cave) a cave of illusion? Or merely of bare fact, and sensuality stripped of sentiment?

At the beginning of the evening, I had been willing to accept the simplest and most obvious explanation: Plato’s was a sanctuary where people might explore sensation divorced from feeling. But something wasn’t right in this preliminary hypothesis. The data didn’t fit the metaphor. If this was a school for the education of sensation, 1 should have seen more polymorphous perversity. As Norman 0. Brown suggested in Love’s Body, the true artist of the senses must overcome the tyranny of the genital obsession. In the mat room, the rhythms were too rapid and aggressive to be sensitive—more mechanical than organic. Most of what I had seen belonged to the hard-driving locomotive theory of sex.

My mind-games were interrupted by Mike, the mat- room guard:

“Would you like to talk to a couple?” he asked. “I told them you were working on a book, and they were interested.”

“Certainly.”

They were not among those I had already observed. The man was in his middle 30s, of medium height and build, with curly hair, a slight foreign accent_; perhaps German. Even without clothes, he appeared suave and self-assured. A man of the world. The woman was thin, pulsing with intensity—a wire stripped of its insulation. Her movements were quick, as if she were on amphetamines_; her eyes devoured me openly, with no hint of modesty. Seeing myself eaten by her gaze, I slipped into the pleasure of being a morsel. She offered a toke of grass, which I took_; I then borrowed a cigarette to prop up my philosophical detachment.

S. K.: “Why do you come here?”

She: “It’s exciting. Besides, I only come when he’s in town, which is two or three times a year.”

He: (Raising the palms of his hands in one of those gestures that means “If you have to ask, I couldn’t explain it to you.”) “No big thing. To Americans, this is new and naughty. But in Europe, there have been clubs like this for a long time, and most of them are more posh, not dark and dingy like this one.”

For a few minutes, we played conversational badminton with the differences between America and Europe. Foreplay before intimacy. Icebreaker. (I wonder why Socrates never thought it necessary to establish trust, disarm, become vulnerable before real dialogue could begin.) The atmosphere softened.

S. K.: When you started going to sex spas in Europe, what were you looking for?”

He “Well, I’m not sure. It certainly wasn’t just to get laid. I suppose it was curiosity at first. I knew what sex was like for me, but not for other people, and I thought if I saw other people making love, I would know something I didn’t know. But I’m not sure what.”

She “I came here the first time because he wanted me to come. But I tell you, I was terrified. He kept talking about it as if it were natural and something people normally did in Europe, at least the really in people.’ We had had really good sex together, so I decided I would try it. Maybe I’d learn something.”

S. K.: “And did you?”

She: “Yes, a lot. But not what I expected to learn. It wasn’t things like different positions or sexual acrobatics. The first thing I really found out about was my own body. I had never really liked myself. I’m too skinny, and my boobs are too small. I had always worn clothes that made me seem fuller. I guess I thought that I was supposed to look like Marilyn Monroe if I was going to get loved good. Well, all that just went ‘poof’ the first time I came here. There were all kinds of bodies making love. I got over the idea that only beautiful people really made love the ‘right’ way real quick. After that, I just felt better about myself.”

He: “Now that I think back, I guess there were some questions I had about myself, although I don’t think I would have admitted that at the time. I think every man secretly thinks other men are superstuds. If our girlfriends sleep with somebody else, we get jealous, but a lot of the jealousy is just the fear that some guy is better than you. Of course we don’t admit this to each other. The first time I saw other couples doing it, I watched the man to see if he was a superstud.”

She: “Well, I can tell you, he wasn’t.” (Everybody laughed, and the trust level rose.)

S. K.: “So at least you are normal.”

She: “Don’t laugh at that. It’s not such a small thing, you know: Most of us spend a lot of years wondering if we are okay, if we are like other people, especially about sex. Here, you can see what other people actually do, and that takes a big load off your imagination.”

He: “I don’t think it’s just seeing other people. It’s also letting them see you. It’s kind of a public display or confession of your sexuality.”

She “There are times when I want to yell ‘Look, ma, look, dad. Look what I’m doing. I’m doing all those dirty, nasty things you told me not to, and I love every minute of it.’ My folks were so uptight about sex, you can’t believe it. They made us feel like the whole thing was disgusting. My mom wanted me to go into nursing or a convent. But I rebelled, and I ended up in reform school. So I started out with every sex hang-up you can imagine, and part of me is still a little girl trying to make sure my life is my own and I have a right to pleasure and love in spite of not being too pretty or too nice.”

As we talked, we were progressively distracted by a couple lying on a chaise longue an arm’s length away. They could not, would not be ignored. She wore black stockings and a garter belt, nothing else. He had dark hair and olive skin, Armenian or Italian. On the dance floor, they snaked, slithered, slid, rubbed, and generally performed for the spectators. I noticed that each time they went into the mattress room they played around, but left without consummation. Their posturing gave evidence that they were playing some drama of their own before a convenient audience.

Our dialogue continued, with half our attention given to the new actors, who were moving from foreplay to the second act of their drama—female astride.

He “Isn’t it strange. Here we are talking, watching people make love, and we are not embarrassed.”

S. K.: “Maybe that’s because we are in a theater. It’s clear they came here to be seen, and as the audience, we play an important part. They are performing an act that is more symbolic than sexual. But if this is sexual theater, what’s the point of the performance?”

He: “Freedom. Not to be controlled by all the old oughts and don’ts and fears and guilts.”

S. K.: “Does it work?”

She: “Well, I’m a long way from being a perfect lover, but I can at least touch someone and enjoy myself.”

Our conversation trailed into a comfortable silence as we watched the inconclusive performance. My mind rushed toward its own climax—a new hypothesis. Orgy is a theater of sexual liberation, a place where the repressed roles are brought to light before the primal audience of forbidden eyes—parents, conscience, the watching institution. The performance is symbolic, but may be therapeutic. I think of Gregory Bateson’s notion of the double bind. Be loving, they tell us—and be inhibited. But in this theater and therapy, we bring back the watchers and force them to witness a drama in which we have created our own lines and characters. We force them to applaud a performance they would have prohibited. In their presence, we touch the untouchables, make public what was private. Double unbind.

In the theater of our minds, we force them to accept us, in the very act of doing what they forbade. Thus, transcendence. We jump beyond the inhibitions that ruled the giants who were our early vides and guardians. But there is a price. When we break the taboos, we become free of the tyranny of the superego, but we must bear the burden of anxiety, self-consciousness, and guilt. Deinhibition and disillusionment destroy the power of the parents that kept us hostage to the past, in servitude to fear. But we also lose the guardian angels that watched over us and allowed us a time of innocence in which to be children. Full sexual autonomy is purchased at a high price —the willingness to bear the burden of freedom and individuality.

INTUITION: COMING TOGETHER

PLATO’S REPUBLIC:

Last of all, he would be able to look at the Sun and contemplate its nature, not as it appears when reflected in water or any alien medium, but as it is in itself in its own domain.

No doubt.

And now he would begin to draw the conclusion that it is the Sun that produces the seasons and the course of the year and controls everything in the visible world, and moreover is in a way the cause of all that he and his companions used to see.

Clearly he would come at last to that conclusion on.

 

It was now 3 A.M. The action in the mat room was slowing down. I watched the detumescence  of the evening with mixed feelings—grateful for the small freedoms that burst forth from my witnessing of forbidden sights, but haunted by the sense that something was missing. The revelation I had expected had not arrived. No opening skies, no sudden intuition of the face of the god Eros. I had traced the flow of desire from its murky delta upstream toward the headwaters, but still had not discovered the source. I probed the unmapped longings and unfulfilled desires within myself, searching for the primal motivation within sexual desire. What intentionality flows through our loins with blind urgency driving us to seed wombs, to create children who will create futures we cannot imagine?

I dove into the torrent of imagination—free-associated—until I was washed ashore in a memory of . . . another orgy. Suddenly I remembered_; I was not such a virgin as I had pretended to be.

In the early 60s, I had been with a large group of people who touched each other, smelled each other, linked arms, laughed, cried, melted into one body, one mind, one voice. For over an hour, we were mystically one flesh. I remember the tears and the welling up in my chest as my little ego burst and I was filled with a mingled essence of other beings. The group-10,000 of us—reached a simultaneous climax as we held each other, swayed together, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Then, Martin Luther King spoke to (for, with, through) the Civil Rights march in Frankfort, Kentucky, and we were a single body-politic. Our eros flowed from a single intuition toward a common goal.

“Yes, but that wasn’t a real orgy,” you may object. “You’re just piaying with words.”

I think not. My body tingled, was shot through with warmth. An electric current ran through my loins, my heart, and my head. On the scale of sensual delights, the Frankfort experience ranked higher than many genital orgasms. It taught me something about eros. There is an instinctual drive in the body and in the body politic toward communion. We are moved to come together. The “I” is restless until it rests in “We.” To be a self is to search for self-transcendence.

In one sense, literal orgies are a symbolic (sexual) acting-out of the instinct for transcendence and communion. The privates are demonstrating in public their need for a communion that is both fleshly and political. The individual has no peace until he or she feels encompassed in something universal. In orgies we have (finally) the chance for a moment to lay the burden of individuality down, to be washed clean of the persona we hold together with glue, bailing wire, and polite roles, to shed the character we have constructed for a lifetime. Instead of being some body, we get to be any body. You don’t know who you are touching. And it doesn’t matter, because you touch beneath the level of personality. Flesh touches flesh. In essence, all nerve endings are equal. None has press clippings, titles on the door, or Harvard diplomas. When we reduce ourselves to flesh, we are one body.

Flesh is a parable of spirit. We may need to start with the lowest common denominator of our essential unity before we explore “higher” orders of communion.

I began to understand the lacuna I sensed at Plato’s. The prisoners in this cave were trapped within self- conscious privacy, performers in a hall of mirrors. The orgy lacked the terrible frenzy of self-loss in which the individual trembled on the brink of annihilation, fell into the undifferentiated hands of desire. The Guardians of Plato’s Republic knew and reverenced divine madness. Only the person who has dared descend into the darkness beneath personality (no lights, no performance, no audience) knows intuitively the source of unity that makes all men and women natural citizens of a commonwealth. The vision of the archetypes, like the Dionysian orgy, was an initiation into the numinous knowledge that in personality, we are many, but in essence, we are one. Plato’s Retreat was fun and games without the risk of transcendence. The rules were clear. Law and order were guaranteed by the guards. And who would be tempted to eat raw meat when a buffet of cole slaw and processed cheese was included in the entrance fee?

Something else was missing, and I didn’t realize what it was until my lungs began to protest against the fetid atmosphere. Dionysus was no indoor god. It was he who taught Nietzsche that important thoughts about human identity can only be thought under an open sky. The cult of Aphrodite was no club for sexual “outlets,” but a transformer of the current that linked the sacred genitals to the generative power of the cosmos. After initiation, one knew the presence of the goddess, equally when excitement engorged the flesh or when wheat pushed its way softly through the dark humus. The fully secularized and trivialized sex of the orgy parlor confined the human spirit to a basement in which there were no windows to the stars.

I wanted out of the cave.

In the closing minutes of the evening, ideas I had been struggling to understand began to converge toward insight. Phrases popped into my mind like bubbles rising to the surface from the depths of intuition. “Truth is the bacchanalian revel where not a soul is sober” —Hegel. “Love is the ontological drive toward the reunion of the separated” —Tillich. The universal energy takes individual form for a moment and then changes, changes, changes. Sexual desire is a lure to seduce us into keeping the evolutionary game going. In the DNA, desire and hope still stroll hand in hand.

For a moment, I stopped being a spectator taking notes at an orgy and became lost in the action. The burden of my individuality was lifted from me, and it seemed safe to trust myself to this wondrous world that perpetually raises questions I cannot answer and that frequently breaks my heart.

POSTLUDE: EROS

AND THE BODY POLITIC

PLATO’S REPUBLIC:

 

It is for us, then, as founders of a commonwealth, to bring compulsion to bear on the noblest natures. They must be made to climb the ascent to the vision of Goodness, which we called the highest object of knowledge; and, when they have looked upon it to enough, they must not be allowed, as they now are, to remain on the heights, refusing to come down again to the prisoners or to take any part in their labors and rewards.

You must go down then, each in his turn, to live with the rest and let your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. You will then see a thousand times better than those who live there always; you will recognize every image for what it is and know what it represents; because you have seen justice, beauty, and goodness in their reality; and so you and we shall find life in our commonwealth no mere dream, as it is in most existing states, where men live fighting one another about shadows and quarreling for power, as if that were a great prize.

 

All too soon my vision of the cosmic orgy faded, and I was back among the fleshpots in underground Manhattan. I gathered my  notepad, took a last look around to fix the images of the place firmly in mind, climbed the stairs, retrieved my safari jacket, and walked out into what we have agreed to call the real world on 74th Street.

Near the entrance to the subway, an old bag lady had made a temporary home. She had gathered shopping bags of trash from a nearby rubbish heap and piled them in a circle, using the back of a building as the only available mighty rock against which to lean. Within the impromptu circle of wagons she sat, defiant but safe, in her mind, against muggers and marauding Indians, engaging herself in schizophrenic dialogue. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched her flesh, and how many years of carelessness it had taken to shrink her universe.

The city was stretching itself awake. The early– morning editions of the paper proclaimed the immi- nent arrival of dawn with the normal eschatological tidings of impending disaster. Israel versus the Arabs. President Carter announces his intention to seek an increase in military budget. Cain versus Abel.

A teenaged prostitute loitering in a doorway asked me: “Are you looking for ‘anything’? Her shoulders curled forward in a depressed slump, her body vainly trying to embrace the vacuum where her heart was, centuries before her face had grown old as the bag lady’s. “No,” I replied. “I’m not looking for anything.” I lied. But my longing was utopian and impossible. I wanted a world in which the lust for power and the pornography of war did not desecrate the flesh. I wanted Eros to triumph over Thanatos. I wanted a happy communion of head, heart, and genitals.

I spotted a small coffee shop that advertised cafe latte and croissants. Minutes later, I was officiating at my private morning ritual. I poured the dark expresso into the steaming milk and watched New York gather its energies for its daily run at glory. I thought of Socrates’ benediction at the end of the Phaedrus:

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul_;may the outward and the inward man be at one.

Sam Keen, a consulting editor of Psychology Today, holds degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Princeton. His books include: Apology for Wonder, To a Dancing God, and What to Do When You’re Bored and Blue. He is still working on a book about the difficult and dangerous art of becoming a lover.